“Where are all the mothers?” she asks.
The answer, of course, is that they’re at work. French mothers go back to work, in part, because they can. The high-quality crèches, subsidized shared nannies, and other child-care options all make the transition logistically possible. It’s no accident that Frenchwomen are supposed to get their figures back in three months. That’s roughly when they go back to the office.
French mothers also go back to work because they want to. In a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of French adults said the most satisfying kind of marriage is one in which both husband and wife have jobs. (Just 71 percent of Americans and Britons said this.)1
Some college-educated women I know do “four-fifths,” in which they stay home with their kids on Wednesday, when there’s no preschool or primary school. But the mothers I meet say they hardly know any women who opt to stay home full-time. “I know one, and she is about to divorce,” sa {ivors ys my friend Esther, the lawyer. Esther recounts this woman’s story as a cautionary tale: She quit her job as a saleswoman to look after the kids. But then she was financially dependent on her husband and thus less entitled to voice her opinions.
“She was withholding her feelings and complaints, and therefore after a while the misunderstandings got worse and worse,” Esther explains. She goes on to say that there are circumstances when mothers can’t really work, such as when a third child arrives. But she says any break from work should be for a limited time, say until the youngest is two.
French professional women tell me that quitting work for even a few years is a precarious choice. “If tomorrow your husband is unemployed, what will you do?” asks my friend Danièle. Hélène, the engineer with three kids, says that she’d really prefer not to work and to rely on her husband’s salary. But she won’t quit. “Husbands can disappear,” she explains.
Frenchwomen work not just for financial security but also for status. Stay-at-home moms don’t have much, at least not in Paris. There’s a recurring French image of a housewife sitting sullenly at a dinner party because no one wants to talk to her. “I have two friends who don’t work. I feel like nobody is interested in them,” Danièle tells me. She’s a journalist in her early fifties with a teenage daughter. “When the kids are grown up, what is your social usefulness?”
Frenchwomen also openly question what their own quality of life would be if they looked after children all day. The French media has no problem describing this experience with cold-eyed ambivalence. One article I read says that for mothers “without a professional activity . . . the principal advantage is to see their kids grow up. But the fact of being an at-home mother brings inconveniences, notably isolation and solitude.”
Since there aren’t many middle-class stay-at-home moms in Paris, there also aren’t many weekday playgroups, story-telling hours, or mommy-and-me classes. The ones that do exist are mostly by and for Anglophones. There’s one fully French kid in our neighborhood playgroup, but he comes with his nanny. His mother, a lawyer, apparently wants the boy to be exposed to English. (I don’t hear him actually speak it.) The mother shows up once, when it’s her turn to host. She has raced back from the office, wearing high heels and a business suit. She looks at us Anglophone mothers, with our sneakers and bulging diaper bags, like we’re a bunch of exotic animals.
American-style parenting and its accoutrements—the baby flash cards and competitive preschools—are by now clichés. There’s been both a backlash and a backlash to the backlash. So I’m stunned by what I see at a playground in New York City. It’s a special toddler area with a low-rise slide and some bouncy animals, separated from the rest of the park by a high metal gate. The playground is designed for toddlers to safely climb around and fall. A few nannies are sitting French-style on benches around the perimeter, chatting and watching their charges play.
Then a white, upper-middle-class mother walks in with her toddler. She follows him around the miniature equipment, while keeping up a nonstop monologue. “Do you want to go on the froggy, Caleb {frooll? Do you want to go on the swing?”
Caleb ignores these questions. He evidently plans to just bumble around. But his mother tracks him, continuing to narrate his every move. “You’re stepping, Caleb!” she says at one point.
I assume that Caleb just landed a particularly zealous mother. But then the next upper-middle-class woman walks through the gate, pushing a blond toddler in a black T-shirt. She immediately begins narrating all of her child’s actions, too. When the boy wanders over to the gate to stare out at the lawn, the mother evidently decides this isn’t stimulating enough. She rushes over and holds him upside down.
“You’re upside down!” she shouts. Moments later, she lifts up her shirt to offer the boy a nip of milk. “We came to the park! We came to the park!” she chirps while he’s drinking.
This scene keeps repeating itself with other moms and their kids. After about an hour I can predict with total accuracy whether a mother is going to do this “narrated play” simply by the price of her handbag. What’s most surprising to me is that these mothers aren’t ashamed of how batty they sound. They’re not whispering their commentaries; they’re broadcasting them.
When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French pediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are. The practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called Stimulation, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. “Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to talk, sing, or entertain constantly.”
Whatever your view on whether this intensive supervision is good for kids, it seems to make child care less pleasant for mothers.2 Just watching it is exhausting. And it continues off the playground. “We might not stay up nights worried about how to keep our whites whiter, but you can bet we’re losing sleep over why little Jasper isn’t yet out of diapers,” Katie Allison Granju writes on babble.com. She describes a mother she knows with an MA in biology who spent the previous week—the whole week—teaching her child to use a spoon.
That biologist surely questioned her own sanity, too. We American mothers know that parenting this intensively has its costs. But like the parents who asked Piaget the American Question—how can we speed up the stages of a child’s development?—we believe that the pace at which our kids advance hinges on the choices we make and on how actively we engage with them. So the cost of not spoon training or narrating a trip down the slide seems unacceptably high, especially when others are doing it.
The standard for how much middle-class mothers should engage with their kids seems to have risen. Narrated play and intensive spoon training are expressions of the “concerted cultivation” that the sociologist Annette Lareau observed among white and African American middle-class parents.3
These parents “see their children as a project,” Lareau explains. “They seek to develop their talents and skills through a series of organized activities, through an intensive process of reasoning and language development, and through close supervision of their experiences in school.”
My decision to live in France is arguably one giant act of concerted cultivation. My project is to make my kids bilingual, international, and lovers of fine cheese. But at least in France, I have other role models, and there are no gifted kindergartens. In America, doing “concerted cultivation” doesn’t feel like a choice. To the contrary, the demands seem to have crept upward. A friend of mine, who works full-time, complained to me that she’s not just expected to go to her daughter’s soccer games; she’s also supposed to attend the practices.4
Elisabeth, a French mother living in Brooklyn, was surprised that American parents were so invested in their children’s success at sports. She writes that she had to repeatedly change the date and time of her ten-year-old’s birthday party to accommodate the match schedules
of his American friends. Each American mother described her own child’s presence at the match as “indispensable,” and claimed that without him or her, “they might lose!”5
The American push to excel often begins before kids can walk. I hear about a mother in New York whose one-year-old had at-home tutors in French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. When her child was two, the mother dropped the French but added lessons in art, music, swimming, and some sort of math. Meanwhile the mother, who’d quit her job as a management consultant, was spending most of her time applying to two dozen preschools.
Such stories aren’t just the province of a few extreme New Yorkers. On a trip to Miami I have lunch with a particularly sane American mother I know, named Danielle. I had thought that if anyone could resist the lure of the frenetic family, she could. She’s levelheaded, warm, and—in a city where people tend to closely follow trends in jewelry—decidedly nonmaterialistic. She spent part of her childhood in Italy, speaks three languages, and is generally comfortable in her own skin. She also has an MBA and a résumé full of high-powered marketing jobs.
Danielle dislikes overzealous parenting. She’s horrified by a mother in her neighborhood whose four-year-old son already takes tennis, soccer, French, and piano lessons. Danielle says this mother is extreme, but simply having her around makes everyone anxious.
“You start thinking: This kid’s doing all that stuff. How is my kid going to compete? And then you have to check yourself and say: That’s not the point. We don’t want him competing with someone like that.”
Nevertheless, Danielle has found herself sliding into a practically nonstop schedule with her own four kids (the youngest are twins). In a typical week her seven-year-old, Juliana, has soccer on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Communion class on Wednesday, Brownies every other Thursday (after soccer), and a playdate on Fridays. Once Juliana gets home, s { geionhe has two hours of homework.
“Last night she had to write a folk tale, she had to write a mini-essay on how Martin Luther King changed America, and she had to study for a Spanish test,” Danielle says.
Recently Juliana said she wanted to take an after-school ceramics class, too. “And me, feeling guilty because there’s no art at the school, said ‘okay, let’s do ceramics.’ The only day she had free was Monday.” Juliana’s whole week is now booked. And Danielle has three other kids.
“The logistics of making sure everyone gets to where they need to be at the correct time has been the best use of the skills I acquired in Operations Management class in business school,” she says.
Danielle acknowledges that she could simply cut out all these activities, except for soccer (her husband is the coach). But what would her kids do at home? She says there’d be no other children around in the neighborhood, since they’re all out doing activities, too.
The net result is that Danielle hasn’t gone back to work. “I always thought that when my kids got to elementary school I could get a full-time job again,” she says. Then she apologizes and rushes off to her car.
The fact that the French state provides and subsidizes child care certainly makes life easier for French mothers. But when I get back to France, I’m struck by how French mothers make their own lives a lot easier, too. The French equivalent of a playdate is that I drop off Bean at her friend’s house, then I leave. (My Anglophone friends assume I’ll stay the whole time.) French parents aren’t curt; they’re practical. They correctly assume that I have other stuff to do. I sometimes stay for a cup of coffee when I return for the pickup.
It’s the same at birthday parties. American and British mothers expect me to stick around and socialize, often for several hours. No one ever says it, but I think part of why we’re there is to make sure our kids are comforted and okay.
But by the time a child is three, French birthday parties are drop-offs. We’re supposed to trust that our kids will be okay without us. Parents are usually invited to come back at the end for a glass of champagne and some hobnobbing with the other moms and dads. Simon and I are thrilled whenever we get invitations: it’s free babysitting, followed by a cocktail party.
In France, there’s an expression for mothers who spend all their free time schlepping their kids around: maman-taxi. This isn’t a compliment. Nathalie, a Parisian architect, tells me that she hires a babysitter to bring her three kids to all their activities on Saturday mornings. She and her husband go out to lunch. “When I’m there I give them 100 percent, but when I’m off, I’m off,” Nathalie tells me.
Virginie, my diet guru, gets together most mornings with a group of moms from her son’s elementary school. I join the group one morning and mention extracurricular activities. The temperature at the table immediately rises. Virginie sits up and speak { upmors for the group. “You have to leave kids alone, they need to be a bit bored at home, they must have time to play,” she says.
Virginie and her friends aren’t slackers. They have college degrees and nice résumés. They’re devoted mothers. Their homes are full of books. Their kids take lessons in fencing, guitar, tennis, piano, and wrestling (weirdly called catch in French). But most just choose one activity per school term.
One of the moms at the café, a pretty, zaftig publicist (like me, she’s trying to “pay more attention”), says she stopped sending her kids to tennis lessons, or anything else, because she found the lessons “constraining.”
“Constraining for whom?” I ask.
“Constraining for me,” she says.
She explains: “You bring them and you wait for an hour, then you have to go back and pick them up. For music you have to make them practice at night . . . It’s a waste of time for me. And the children don’t need it. They have a lot of homework, they have the house, they have other games at the house, and there are two of them so they can’t get bored. They’re together. And we go away every weekend.”
I’m struck by how these small decisions and assumptions make daily life different for French mothers. When they have moments to spare, French mothers pride themselves on being able to detach and relax. At the hairdresser, I tear out an article from an issue of French Elle in which a mother says that she loves taking her two boys to the old-fashioned merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower.
“While Oscar and Léon try to catch the wooden rings . . . I spend thirty minutes in pure relaxation. I usually turn off my cell phone and I just space out while I’m waiting for them . . . it’s like a deluxe babysitter!” I know that merry-go-round well. I usually spend my half hour there waiting to wave at Bean each time she comes around.
It’s no coincidence that so many French mothers seem to parent this way. The let-them-be principle comes straight from Françoise Dolto, the patron saint of French parenting. Dolto very clearly argued for leaving a child alone, safely, to muddle about and figure things out for herself.
“Why does a mother do everything for her child?” Dolto asks in The Major Stages of Childhood, a collection of her remarks. “He’s so content to deal with things himself, to pass the morning getting dressed by himself, to put on his shoes, so happy to put on his sweater backwards, to get tangled up in his pants, to play, to rummage around in his corner. So he doesn’t go to the market with his mother? Well too bad, or even better!”
On Bastille Day, I take Bean to the grassy field in our neighborhood park. It’s filled with parents and their young kids. I’m not narrating Bean’s play, but I don’t really expect to have a chance to read the three-week-old magazine that I’ve brought along for myself, along with a giant sack of books and toys for her. I spen {r hhe d a lot of the day helping her play with the toys and reading to her.
On the next blanket over is a French mother. She’s a thin, auburn-haired woman who’s chatting with a girlfriend while her year-old daughter plays with, well, not much of anything. The mother seems to have brought just one ball to amuse her daughter for the entire afternoon. They have lunch, and then the little girl plays with the grass, rolls around a bit, and checks out the scene. Meanwhile, her mot
her has a full adult conversation with her friend.
It’s the same sun and the same grass. But I’m having an American picnic and—voilà—she’s having a French one. Not unlike those mothers back in New York, I’m trying to cheer Bean on to the next stage of development. And I’m willing to sacrifice my own pleasure to do that. The French mom—who looks as though she could buy a fancy handbag if she wanted to—seems content to let her daughter “awaken” all by herself. And her little girl evidently doesn’t mind at all.
All this goes a long way toward explaining the mysteriously calm air of French mothers I see all around me. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a crucial missing piece. That ghost in the French mothering machine is, I think, how Frenchwomen cope with guilt.
Today’s American mothers spend much more time on child care than parents did in 1965.6 To do so, they have cut back on housework, relaxing, and sleeping. Nevertheless, today’s parents believe they should be spending even more time with their kids.
The result is enormous guilt. I see this when I visit Emily, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter. After I’ve been with Emily for a few hours, it dawns on me that she has said “I’m a bad mother” a half-dozen times. She says it when she caves in to her daughter’s demand for extra milk or when she doesn’t have time to read her more than two books. She says it again when she’s trying to make the little girl sleep on a schedule and to explain why she occasionally lets her cry a bit at night.
I hear other American moms say “I’m a bad mother,” too. The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says “I’m a bad mother” so often that, though it sounds negative, I realize that she must find the phrase soothing.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 15